This programme deals with
automatic detection and counting of pedestrians using 3D stereo images.
This research is motivated by the strong need to automate the management
of both traffic and pedestrian flow by intelligent traffic control
systems. Its aims to develop techniques to provide dynamic pedestrian
flow data, such as the number and nature of pedestrians waiting to
cross the road at a given time instant.

Advanced traffic management
systems rely on traffic sensors to provide vehicle detection and classification,
incident detection and automatic traffic surveillance. While existing
inductive loop detectors give information concerning vehicle presence,
other parameters such as traffic density and speed must be interpreted
from the measured data and this may not have sufficient accuracy for
some applications. Furthermore induction loops can be degraded over
time and are relatively expensive to install. This project aims to
investigate a reliable and cost-effective acoustic vehicle detection
and tracking system.

Early orthodontic treatment can be a shorter and more favourable than treating a patient at a later age. In chioldren and young adults, a dental cross-bite does not always cause an abnormal jaw movement. However, if facial lop-sideness is present it will worsen during growth without orthodontic treatment.The lower jaw completes its growth phase at approximately 20 years of age but a child’s mid face, which includes the upper jaw stops growing at approximately 12 years of age. It is therefore imperative to take advantage of this short ‘window of opportunity’ to promote correct muscular function, establish nasal breathing, and encourage forward facial growth, all of which not only result in a stable bite (good occlusion) and straight teeth, but greatly enhances the facial appearance. There are some dental clinics in Ireland offering this new treatment, one particular dentist in Ballincollig has a quite impressive track record with myofunctional therapy.
It is now possible to help children to modify these destructive patterns and as a result not only see an improvement in the growth and development of the face, jaws, and dentition, but in their overall health and wellbeing.

The team at DCU is building
a locally distributed search engine to support searching on a locally-stored
collection of 95,000,000 web pages. This will allow a large throughput
of local searching for various projects that need to local, fast,
large-scale corpus information. In parallel, the team at UCD has developed
a technique for web searching which sits on top of a conventional
search utility and uses logging of user searches and results to inform
and re-rank web pages in subsequent web searches. To date this work
has concentrated in domain-specific narrow search areas. The two research
teams are collaborating to build a combined local, distributed search
utility on top of which is an analysis of past queries to adaptively
inform future web queries. The work will be benchmarked against other
techniques for searching large web collections in the annual TREC
activity, coordinated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
in the US.

This project aims to develop
wireless sensor networks that incorporate chemical sensors for feedback
on environmental conditions. Initial work will focus on the implementation
of such systems using commercial wireless platforms, with the long
term goal being to develop and implement our own hardware. The proposed
systems are to be self-organising in nature, resulting in truly adaptive,
autonomous sensor networks. Our vision is to deploy these in a range
of real field trials, where low-power environmental monitoring is
required.

The goal of 'object extraction'
has long been the holy grail of audio-visual processing and yet, extensive
research using standard video has not led to significant progress.
This project hopes to address this challenging research task by using
multiple input sources, such as stereo cameras and infrared imagers,
to gather more information about a scene and thus make the problem
tractable.